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Oh my. My husband's grandmother just gave me this book and a bag of...pantyhose for my birthday. In addition to (as usual) ladies bath products to which I am allergic. I wasn't bothered but my husband sure the heck was about those pantyhose. I wrote that part off as her being an old lady and passing sense on what's appropriate to give to people but my husband was like "girl! Do.not.let.her.fool.you." :p

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The yeast may be connected to treating the UTI. The headaches, exhaustion and lethargy are classic signs of persistent hunger. You are a tall girl with lots of muscle, just sitting on a chair and walking around your apartment (I know that's not all you do but it's an example) uses a fairly large number of calories. Unless your portions are gigantic, I don't know that you are getting enough to eat net of your calorie burn. The headaches , exhaustion and fatigue tend to indicate that you are not.

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I don't know. I have a box of clothes in storage, it may be in there. It was just a simple, on über clearance inexpensive to begin with a-line. Jessica McClintock IIRC. I paid under $60 for it.

A couple of things. -it's hard to get construction financing for a smaller floor plan or anything the bank thinks they couldn't move easily in the event of s foreclosure. I have had two friends in this area who have had to build a much larger home than they wanted in order to get financing. So if you will need a construction loan, think carefully about your plans for a non-large or a smaller eco-friendly house kit. Another ended up borrowing from their retirement to build because they wanted to build only a small house. -there are a lot of lots for sale on hillsides here that are of dubious condition to build in. Slides must be considered carefully. What is holding up the hill? you need to pay for your own reports on the actual feasibility to build. That can't be done on the cheap. Good luck. I know buying around here ain't easy.

She did this because those potential buyers have other agents and she is likely friends with these sellers. She makes a lot more money with a lower selling price than she does with only representing you and not also the buyer. If she was looking out for you, she would have done those showings and tried to get a bidding war going. Once you are in contract, expect her to pressure you to kowtow to their post inspection demands and such. The whole thing stinks.

Yeah, I am in the PNW. It's cold water. Not sorta cold; really, really cold.

You know, a mark of maturity is being able to reflect on one's own rudeness and those times when our zeal and passion crosses the line to telling people that they aren't keeping their kids safe over wading and perfectly ordinary childhood activities. You know the reason your tone bothered me so much? You sound quite a bit like I did about water safety and a host of other issues at say, age 23-25, before I knew I had a kid who due to a neurological difference would wholly eschew learning to swim. I hope for your sake everything works out according to your rigid ideals and perfect standards but that's not the space I personally get to inhabit. I will say it's nice to let go of the young mom of young kids anxiety though. Stating that you have to supervise yor swimming kids in the tub and then backing that down to a keeping the ear open thing (and really, with 4 other kids you would never miss anything? Seriously?) highlights the excessiveness of your rhetoric. Swimmers drown. People have cardiac events while swimming every week. The only drowning victim I personally know was a strong diver and swimmer (he had cardiac arrest mid dive). Why not just all stay off the water? Cars kill people every hour. A 5-9 year old is almost 3 times more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than drowning. A 10-14 year old is twice as likely to die due to motor vehicle accident than drowning. And 15+ year olds are 13 times more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than a drowning accident. Why drive anywhere? Because risk tolerance is a part of life. My approach reflects the reality that drowning risk falls as the leading cause of injury related death once a child is 5. I treat my 12 year old considerably differently than when he was 4 (and I still was paying for futile swimming lessons thinking it might work, lol).

Arctic. I do not supervise my 12 year old in the bath tub nor would I consider it vaguely appropriate to do so. Hello, the boy is 12 and can ride his bike for five miles alone. He doesn't need parents lurking over him in the bath. We are also private people and respect his modesty. Nor do I worry much about a kid who won't go in too far due to a phobia spending his time on the river as a 5th generation flyfisherman with keen and experienced adults. One thing to remember about a kid who is afraid of water getting on his face- he can be trusted to be more cautious than necessary in any given situation. Your kids are little and you really don't know how savvy my older son is around water or what precautions we take in what situations or even really what sort of conditions we allow him to get in water. Do me the favor of assuming that I not only know my child, I know what is best for him and am not an idiot putting him in excessive risk. I'm certainly not unwilling to jump in and assist a child in an accident but in all these years on the water, I never have had to. Swimmers have drowned in all the same situations my son faces as a non-swimming fisherman and recreational splasher. My husband is barely a swimmer. He can float. A little. By your metric he shouldn't walk by the lake or ride a boat as a fully grown man. Seriously? Um, no. Life is full of risks and we don't stop living just because something might happen. That doesn't make us reckless or foolish. It means I'm not going to suggest my son take up kayaking or waterskiing but it also doesn't mean I am going to move to a landlocked area and keep my son out of any and all water either. He will learn, or not, when and if he is ready. Your level of rhetoric is excessive and bluntly, I really don't appreciate your assumptions about my ability to care for my children effectively. It's borderline rude.

We vacation with friends a fair bit. It gives the kids some built in entertainment and the adults each some downtime. We added a new family to the mix this year who we aren't as close to but it was fine. We still get lots of family time.

I have family members who are black, all of whom I love but I must admit I don't like my brother who is black one little bit. Trust me that this has nothing to do with him being black and everything to do with him being a terrible person and abusive father. We have the same mother and our contact, until he gets help (if he ever gets help), is limited to primarily text messages about picking up and dropping off my niece and nephew. I have long standing friendships with a few black families and peers from high school and college. Unfortunately, we are separated by distance and have to content ourselves with Facebook and semiregular visits. The friend from college who married us is black and we really wish we lived close. When we did, we saw each other all the time. I don't really consider your definition of friend to be accurate of having a cross cultural friendship honestly. Of course I know and see and interact with black people everyday but honestly, unless I see them socially and intentionally in a mutual way, I don't count them as my friend. To me that smacks of "but I have black friends!" I'm friendly with some nice African immigrant moms from the homeschool group I am in but I think it would be rude for me to presume we are friends. We might become friends but we are just getting to know each other.

I wonder if we live in the same city. Sounds like a similar set up.

The schools here do not have pools per say but many high schools are built adjacent to or walking distance from a community center with a pool. I think all 3rd or 4th graders here get lessons. I got lessons via school but we walked about 1.5 blocks to the community center pool. The community centers are owned and operated by the city but the school district has access via some sort of lease arrangement.

I have to agree. How do my kids get less afraid, to say nothing of learning if they can't get within 10 FT of water? My sons spend a lot of time at the beach, a lot of time at the lake near our home and a lot of time fishing. It would be great if they could swim but frankly they could fall and drown in the tub too and I still expect them to bathe.

Believe me some people do. There was one kid in such bad shape on my student conservation association crew they came *this* close to hiking to a call point and requesting an ATV to pull him out. My older son can't swim. It would never even dawn on me to sign him up for a sport on the water. That said, the swimming lessons that he needs aren't vaguely affordable. He's scared of water and has autism, he likely won't learn unless he works 1 on 1 with a very skilled adaptive swim teacher. The group lessons he did got him nowhere. The one on one volunteer adaptive swim coaches via the Y couldn't help either. So I definitely don't consider lessons all that accessible!

Generally banks will give you a new account number if your checks have been stolen. Definitely lock it down now. You don't need to stop payment on those checks. When we had someone steal a whole box of checks out bank handled it no problems, no fees. We had new everything that day. Get to the bank first thing in the morning if you don't happen on the checks first. I hope for your sake they are just stashed somewhere and the stress is momentarily causing you to forget that you moved them for safe keeping during the showing or something. Either way, it's a hassle and I am so sorry. Re: the real estate issue I second (seventeenth?) the advice to ditch this realtor, report her and to not accept any offers from these nutcases again. You have an affordable, desirable sounding home priced to sell. Wait a bit and you will get a decent offer. If they did steal the checks, they could be planning to raid the account with a fraudulent wire transfer or something when your distribution hits. That could be part of why they don't want escrow. So you have the money for a day before you pay off the mortgage. Would your current lender even agree to no escrow? That's just nuts. Again, I am sorry you are dealing with this. You don't deserve this much stress. Moving for a new job is stressful enough. I hope it all works out and you get a great, legit offer soon.

Not 6 years from now but we'd love another one sooner than that. ;)

Oddly, I don't think I have been back since November 1997, lol. But I guess it's good I went that night because 2 years later, we started dating and 2 years after that we got married and about 2 years after that the baby came by in the baby carriage. We should go back sometime. :p

Well, I think we can all agree that no one should eat the cat spit chicken. I eat everything. But not cat spit chicken. You know how Garfield's schtick is loving lasagna? Our cat loves pizza. We absolutely can not leave a homemade pizza or a pizza box out for even 1/2 hour or we will lose it to the cat standing on it and eating off any bits of meat. Yuck. I am not easily grossed out but cat spit is on my no way list.

I'm not familiar with the Renton one at all since we live a gajillion minutes of traffic away from there. I think I was probably responding while you were editing. One thing to know, just in case someone you know asks or you look into it for your daughter is that it's pretty easy to get an out of district transfer for the ALEs. I know of at least one ALE that for sure will transfer in homeschool high school credits and another that basically only handles transcripts and Running Start for high schoolers. Since we do most of our work at home, I'd rather drive for a 1-2x a week class than use the ALE in my district which I find rather restrictive and not exactly onerous but not exactly friendly either IYKWIM. It seems more geared to people who bombed out of public school than homeschooling families. There's also one high school that I know for sure accepts high school homeschoolers without costing them years of credit and again, it's usually open enrollment even to out of district waivers.

We keep my husband's art major portfolio. It's big, it's bulky but every so often it's nice to crack it open and marvel at the talent and skill he has. My husband is a ticket stub/playbill/opera libretto hoarder. He has every single one in a fairly large box. I teased him about this but I do have to admit they evoke memories I wouldn't recall without the tangible item. I eased off teasing him when, after ten years of wondering when we'd actually met the dude produced an ice skating ticket from a dorm excursion and settled that matter...11/1997 at Highland Ice Arena. I keep a bamboo plant my mother took care of for years. A rather (IMO) fugly but objectively nice child rocking chair my husband's great grandfather built for my husband's grandfather. I'd jsut as soon get rid of it but his family, his decision. And if we ever have another boy it would be named for my husband's grandfather so it does seem like a nice think to keep for a namesake.

Maybe I only know cerebral fine print readers but I really haven't come across people here that are wholly in the dark. Misinformed, yes. Sometimes the misinformation comes from the district, sometimes for the ALE but most often it comes from other homeschooling parents. Still everyone I know who is using the ALEs seems to get that the ALEs are public school programs and that FT enrollment means you don't need to file a DOI. The most common bit of misinformation is that if you use the ALE you have to test there or you can only use district curriculum. Which, I can attest from personal experience, is just plain not true. I seriously doubt more that 1/2 of the kids at the one we attended tested this last year and I know parents who use the ALEs using all manner of curriculum, religious or not. As for high school and grade promotion, one of the biggest advantages that I see of the ALEs is that I can get an official transcript for all of his home based work. His counselor can add high school credits for me at any time (which we are shying away from starting intently because of the spelling bee*). I know many homeschooled juniors and seniors who decided to spend the last 1-2 years at a regular school and were able to do so, even if they were accelerated and young for their grade, because their parent(s) jumped through the ALE hoops from the time they started high school level work and had their home based instruction documented with a standard transcript. If that's a door people want open to them, they have to research it in advance, ideally before high school. Some high schools and ALEs are easier to work with than others for sure. I have heard a number of not great things about the ALEs on the Eastside (I think one even closed more than a few years back) and the one in our new area was/is not ok with me so we don't use it. I know more than a few eastside families who go through one of a few other districts (primarily Edmonds or Monroe, which are the most popular). *I swear if I feel controlled by or beholden to anything, it's the friggin spelling bee. ;)

I think it matter far less than is often argued on these boards. Parents need to know but honestly, I don't know any parents who don't know. The people I know who make the biggest deal about this IRL are often spreading rumors and scare tactics, like if your child interacts with the school system a litany of bad stuff will descend on you like locusts. Not seeing any locusts.